Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/90

 to cut out of the decretals the bull which Nicholas III. had promulgated at Rome. The Order as a whole gave way; but many an honest friar and clerk muttered in advance his "e pur si muove."

This was a turning-point of the early Reformation. If it had been humanly possible to crush the Papacy in the fourteenth century, or even to liberate the national Churches from papal control or interference, the task would have been accomplished. For the spiritual blow delivered by the Franciscans in 1322 was as staggering in its way as the political blow administered by Philip of France less than twenty years before. And in fact, both in the political and in the spiritual order, the work of those twenty years was substantially effectual. It was in the direct line of thought and action from Avignon and Perugia onwards, through the Schoolmen and the Lollards, through Marsiglio of the University of Paris and Wyclif of the University of Oxford, that the statesmen and clerics of the sixteenth century derived their power to strike and to conquer. With the Spiritual Franciscans Wyclif never ceased to be in full sympathy; but when he came to maturity they were comparatively few and insignificant.

Such, then, were the monks and the friars with whom Wyclif was brought into contact and conflict in the fourteenth century—distinct from each other and from the national Church, by no means always in harmony, yet all in a large measure subordinate to a foreign authority, and all virtually combined in common defence of their positions against the innovating spirit of the early Reformers.